Monday, September 30, 2013

Staunton, September 30 – Moscow has
already assembled “a multitude of allies around the world” in its campaign to
oppose American hegemonism and globalism, but in its “struggle to create a
multi-polar world,” Russia must “seek to acquire allies within the United
States,” first and foremost among American isolationists, according to a Moscow
blogger.

In an article posted on the “Telegrafist”
site today, Maksim Sigachyov suggests that there are “two possible directions”
Moscow could pursue in its effort to find “enemies of American globalism within
the US” – focusing on separatists within the US or joining forces with “patriotic
isolationists” in the Republican Party who oppose the “neo-conservative
imperialists” (telegrafist.org/2013/09/30/89858/).

The latter which
some call “isolationist paleo-conservativism” is more powerful, Sigachyov says,
dominating as it does the right wing of the Republican Party including figures
like Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Patrick Buchanan, and Paul Weyrich and with deep
roots in the Tea Party movement.Thus,
it is a better ally for Moscow in its campaign for a multi-polar world.

According to the Russian blogger,
now is the time for Moscow to form an alliance with these American “patriotic
isolationists” because, he says, “the overwhelming majority of Americans are
against a military strike on Syria and more generally are against their country
being drawn into new conflicts abroad when nothing is threatening the security”
of the US.

“Ordinary Americans” no longer
support “humanitarian intervention” and thus have views like those of Robert
Taft (1889-1953), who as a leader in the US Senate opposed American entry into
World War II and opposed American involvement in Europe after the war which prompted
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to describe his ideas in 1952 as “the new isolationism”
(theatlantic.com/past/politics/foreign/asiso.htm).

Taft’s views,
Sigachyov says, were based on the idea of a “Fortress America” capable of
defending itself if attacked but otherwise largely uninterested in what is
taking place elsewhere in the world.And
those ideas, the Russian blogger argues, are now to be found throughout the
United States, to the consternation of liberal internationalists and American
financial interests.

According to Sigachyov, who bases
his argument on Shevlyakov’s article, there are four basic principles
underlying American isolationism: “the US must built a ‘fortress America,” its
strength willguarantee that no one will attack it, “the US must not interfere
in foreign conflicts in ways that undermine its defense capabilities, and “involvement
in wars threatens” to create “a dictatorship” in the US itself.

One can see certain “parallels,” the
Russian blogger says, with Russian Eurasianist and geopolitical writer
Aleksandr Dugin, who writes about “’another Europe,’ as an alternative to the
liberal-Atlanticist” variant in that American isolationists oppose the idea of “another
America” to liberal internationalism of almost all kinds.

It is clearly in Russia’s interests,
he suggests, to promote these “isolationist tendencies of Amereican
continentalism.”Indeed, he argues, there
may even be possibilities to conduct “a dialogue of Eurasian continentalism and
American continentalism.” But even before that, the American isolationists will
help “destroy the Global Wall Street.”

Reaching out to American
isolationists, Sigachyov says in conclusion, has ideological value within Russia
because “right Republican isolationists” in the US and Russian nationalists both
rely on “entrepreneurial forces” to oppose banks and global financial
players.And the American example, he
says, will help Russians develop “an absolutely patriotic ideology.”

Staunton, September 30 –With a
Russian court having now declared the Koran to be “extremist,” Moscow has finally
done what it says only Wahhabist and other Islamist radicals and hostile foreign
intelligence services want: it has provoked not just the leadership of Russia’s
20plus million Muslims but this community as a whole.

Muslims in Moscow and in cities
across the country have put up banners denouncing the Novorossiisk court’s September
17 decision to declare a translation of the Koran “extremist” – the one on the
Moscow ring road reads “Russia Against Islam: the Koran is Banned” – staged demonstrations,
and begun petition drives to have the Kremlin overturn this declaration.

According
to Krasnoyarsk Mufti Gayaz-khazrat Faatkullin, what has happened to the Koran
in Russia could easily happen to the holy books of other faiths, a dangerous
development in which is “evident the shadow of the era which ended in the 1990s”
and one that all believers must therefore oppose.

How
far this effort by Muslims will go is unclear: their anger at the Russian state
may dissipate more or less quickly because that state, however oppressive it
may be in particular cases, is not capable of enforcing a ban on the Koran
across the entire country.But it is
clear that Russia’s Muslims are angry about this action, and that poses two challenges
for the Kremlin.

In
the short term, President Vladimir Putin will have to choose between two
unpalatable outcomes: overturning the declaration of the court about the “extremism”
of the basic text of Islam, something that will infuriate many Orthodox Russian
nationalists, or enforcing the decree which will only further alienate Russia’s
Muslims and the Muslim world abroad.

And
in the longer term, Putin’s regime and its successors will have to deal with a
problem they have helped create: a growing sense of Muslim identification among
various peoples of the Russian Federation and a willingness of Muslims to
organize politically against the regime.

That
danger is already present.According to
recent surveys, ever more Muslims in the Russian Federation are prepared to
support Muslim political parties, with an absolute majority in many
predominantly Muslim republics saying they would (ng.ru/faith/2013-09-20/1_islam.html).

Whatever Putin decides to do, this
latest case of overreaching by a Russian court, apparently animated more by
anti-Islamic attitudes among many Russians than by any legal standard Russia or
otherwise, has made the situation far worse for the Kremlin than have any
earlier actions by any Muslim group in the Russian Federation.

Staunton, September 30 – Stalin’s
first act of ethnic engineering, one that he and many others believe eliminated
any chance that the Middle Volga could pursue independence, was to divide
Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, surround both by ethnically Russian territories,
and include significant ethnic Russian populations within them.

This research – and the site
promises additional articles on the ethnic demography of other non-Russian
republics in the future – is interesting not only because it shows the kind of
studies that the 2010 all-Russian census makes possible but also because it unintentionally
highlights Russian nervousness about the aspirations of these republics.

Regarding Tatarstan, the
Sinn-Fein-Front site begins with three oft-cited statistics: the small size of
the Tatars relative to the population of the Russian Federation (3.72 percent),
the small share of Tatars living in Tatarstan (23.7 percent), and the
complicated ethnic mix within Tatarstan (with half of the population being
Tatar but almost as many being ethnic Russians).

And then it argues that most Tatars
living outside the republic are well integrated into Russian life and have
little interest in returning to their “historical Motherland.” Only Tatars
already living there are characterized by what the site calls “aggressive Tatar
nationalism” and far from all of them.

But the most interesting data in the
article are those concerning the ethnic composition of of Tatarstan’s regions
as displayed in a series of maps.Tatars
are a minority in most of the parts of the republic and Tatarstan, as an ethnic
entity, “is divided into three parts which are not connected with one another,”
and thus, “the separation of Tatarstan from Russia is impossible.”

The site provides a similar set of
data for Bashkortostan and the Bashkirs.It notes that only slightly more than half of the Bashkirs live in
Bashkortostan, that they are outnumbered there by the Slavs (37 percent to 29.5
percent), and that they “dominate only in the south east and in a fragmentary
way in the north.”

Thus, the Sinn-Fein-Front page
concludes “the establishment of a pure Bashkiria even on the territory of
Bashkortostan is problematic.”And it is
made even more problematic, it asserts, because of the complicated relations of
the Bashkirs with the Tatars – the site suggests their relationship is
analogous to the Ukrainians and the Russians – and with the Finno-Ugrics.

Therefore, the site concludes, “the
risk of separatism is minimal” in Bashkortostan just as it is in
Tatarstan.Both republics, it continues,
will be satisfied if they have significant cultural autonomy and local
self-administration within a Russian nation state, something this Russian
nationalist says no one can reasonably oppose.

And consequently, the site says,
those who think that “the transformation [of the Russian Federation] into an
[ethnic] Russian state will automatically lead to the separation of the Middle
Volga and Siberia and more generally to the reduction of Rus to the borders of
Moscow oblast” are wrong.”

Unfortunately for the
Sinn-Fein-Front author, there are at least two reasons for thinking his
argument is incomplete.On the one hand,
and as was obviously the case with the non-Russian union republics of the USSR in
1991, nationalist movements do not assume that the demographic situation they
find themselves in is permanent.

Some of them clearly pursued
independence because they feared that they would be ethnically swamped by
Russians if they did not, and others did so out of a belief that as independent
countries, they would have the opportunity to change the demographic mix on
their territories in the future.

And on the other, if one uses the
data provided by Sinn-Fein-Front but considers it in terms of ethnic Russian
settlement patterns, those who argue for the elimination of the non-Russian
republics through amalgamation like Vladimir Putin does or those who want a Russian
nation state are up against the same problems that this page says the Tatars
and Bashkirs are.

Those areas in the Russian
Federation which are ethnically Russian in the sense Sinn-Fein-Front suggests
for the Tatars and Bashkirs are also disconnected one from another, and thus any
effort to unite them in an ethnically Russian state could prove just as futile –
and counterproductive – and this site says the non-Russians would find an
analogous pursuit to be.

Sunday, September 29, 2013

Staunton, September 29 – Russia’s detention
and subsequent expulsion of a Helsinki lawyer who has written books sharply
critical of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland in 1940 is part of a
disturbing new Russian campaign that reflects Vladimir Putin’s view that the
Winter War allowed Stalin to “correct” earlier Bolshevik mistakes about Soviet-Finnish
border.

On Friday evening, Kari
Silvennoinen, a Finnish lawyer and the author of two books that criticize Moscow’s
actions in 1939-1940, “Soviet Guilt” and “Soviet War Crimes Against Finland,”
was arrested at a Moscow airport and kept without food and water for 14 hours before being expelled (finrosforum.wordpress.com/2013/09/28/finnish-lawyer-arrested-in-moscow/).

Russian officials, Silvennoinen told
a Helsinki newspaper, “say that I have not been arrested but this is a locked
room” (iltasanomat.fi/ulkomaat/art-1288603869809.html).
“I was able to call my Russian partner in St Petersburg. He talked with the
border guard officers, but even he could not find out what this was all about.”
His partner suggested that it may have been designed to “scare off”
Silvennoinen from working on a criminal case in Russia.

On his return to Helsinki Saturday
night, the lawyer said that he “realize[s] that I am not wanted in Russia. Back
in time, I was persona non grata in the Soviet Union — now I am the
same in Russia as well. […] I would like to know the official reason [for my
arrest]. Naturally, they will never disclose the actual reason,” Silvennoinen suggested

He said he suspects he was arrested
because of Moscow’s efforts to “criminalize” any deviation from Moscow’s
official line on World War II and because of his work with Russian clients.
Silvennoinen said he would not go back to Russia but would meet Russian clients
in Helsinki: “Russia has gone full Soviet again. It is better to stay away.”

Because this incident has been resolved
and because neither Helsinki nor Moscow have commented officially, there is a
strong likelihood that little will be said.But it is clear that this is part of a broader effort by the Putin
regime against anyone in Finland who criticizes it. To give but one example, there
currently denial of service attacks against some Finnish sites.

Russian President Putin is clearly
behind such actions.In March, he declared
that Stalin had launched the Winter War
in order to “correct” mistakes of earlier Bolshevik leaders who had allowed
Finland’s border with the USSR to come within “17-20 kilometers” of Petersburg (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/search?q=finland+stalin+bolsheviks).